кореспонденцията

The literary heritage of Boyan Penev has not been collected and systematized. The eightieth anniversary of the birth of our great literary historian and critic should be an occasion to return to this heritage, to search for the valuable in it, which will benefit us in our further work. Penev's work is complex and contradictory. In it, the method of the serious scientist, the literary historian and erudite is combined with the subjectivist passions of the critic, who is more than once extreme in his conclusions, biased in his attacks. However, in Penev's works, even when they do not stand the test of time, we will always be impressed by the author's personality, categorically prominent and independent, comprehensively prepared and artistic. The overall assessment of Penev's work has yet to be carried out and it will be an important moment in the common efforts to assimilate everything positive and significant in our literary heritage. In this booklet, the magazine "Literary Thought" publishes several letters from Penev's correspondence to his wife, the poet Dora Gabe. The letters have a double meaning. First of all, they are a document characterizing Penev's personality. They contain information about Penev's attitude to important social issues (for example, the letter of September 22, 1912, written on the occasion of Penev's mobilization during the Balkan War), the breadth of his interests, his special literary and musical culture are evident. The letters also reflect his distinctive temperament and style. Second, the letters provide valuable material for some of the literary relations of the time. The names of Yavorov and Pencho Slaveykov, with whom Boyan Penev maintained close contact, are intertwined in them. Penev's attitude towards Yavorov is not free from a certain bias, which is evident both in the categorical opinions about the moral character of the poet, and in the clearly untenable views about Yavorov's nature as an "unchangeable given" or about the reasons for Yavorov to write "At the Foot of Vitosha". But our Literary Science is obliged to know the literary life of the time from sources, regardless of what subjective and incorrect moments in these sources it may encounter.

The epistolary heritage has, as is well known, an important significance for illuminating the personality of a given social, political or cultural figure, for revealing his "peace of mind", the motives of his actions, etc., as well as for filling in the gaps or correcting the inaccuracies made in his biography. This is especially true for the period of formation, maturation of the creative personality, for which period there is usually very scarce or uncertain information. Hence the justified interest that is shown in the correspondence of prominent personalities both by the researcher and by the wide circle of readers.